I was rather surprised and pleased by this horror/suspense film. I didn’t expect much going in, that’s for sure. It’s a film in the “city folk go out into the country and run afoul of the rubes” movie mixed a bit with the DNA of Misery. But it has a twist in that the rubes aren’t your usual backwoods hilljacks, mutant cannibals, or monsters.

Spell is about a successful African American lawyer who is returning (by small plane) to Kentucky to bury his father, a man he escaped from twenty+ years ago and had never planned to go back. The plane crashes and he wakes up injured, without his family, in the attic of the locals. Black locals who practice Afro/Caribbean/Appalachian voodoo/hoodoo black magic and they ain’t exactly rushing him to the hospital.

I like the twist on the usual backwoods-are-dangerous plot with basically a race swap. I guess you could argue making the villains black isn’t progress but it IS a black film so that is representation of a sort. And I did learn to dislike his captors with their pious-but-sadistic attitudes and various voodoo-like hexes. They aren’t on the level of Kathy Bates in Misery or all those Satanists in Rosemary’s Baby but they aren’t that far apart. And that’s what makes this kind of captivity movie good… or at least creepy in that loss-of-freedom kind of way.

I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did and think anyone looking for a good horror/suspense film might dig it. It was well acted, fairly gory (beware), and pretty suspenseful, if not outright scary.

Score: 82